The protective sheath surrounding the brain’s blood supply—known as the blood-brain barrier—is a safeguard against nasty germs and toxins. But it also prevents existing drugs that could potentially be used to treat brain cancer or Alzheimer’s disease from reaching the brain. That’s why scientists want to unchain the gates of this barrier. Now a new study shows it’s been done in cancer patients.
Alexandre Carpentier, a neurosurgeon at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, used ultrasound to open the blood-brain barrier in patients with recurrent glioblastoma—the most common and deadly tumor originating in the adult brain—allowing for delivery of chemotherapy that would otherwise reach the tumor in miniscule amounts. The preliminary results of the early phase clinical trial were reported Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine.
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